1. Field of the Invention
The present invention generally relates to online catalog product availability updating systems and more particularly to an improved online catalog product availability updating system that pushes an availability date to the online catalog depending upon the status of capacity buckets in a scheduling application.
2. Description of the Related Art
In an e-business environment it is critical to provide customers with accurate, timely and up to date information on the “availability” of products they may choose to order. Products are often sold through electronic on-line catalogs over public and private networks. For example, it is common for a manufacturer or sales organization to provide an on-line catalog over the Internet. Additionally, salespeople often quote price and shipment times based upon on-line electronic catalogs they maintain on private networks. These on-line catalogs usually include an anticipated availability date that is updated periodically. In this context, “availability” means when that product would be able to be shipped to the customer if ordered right now. By its very nature, this “availability” information is time sensitive and can change from moment to moment based upon available supply and order placement activity.
Currently availability dates are scheduled with the use of a “scheduling application.” Product availability information is obtained by doing “extracts” from the scheduling application databases to create a list of product availability for all products. When automated, these extracts are typically performed by overnight batch runs that take the results and populate on-line catalogs that are viewable by the customer on the Internet. For on-line catalogs that may contain thousands or tens of thousands of items, only a small percentage are likely to change from one day to another. So for most products, the availability is accurate for the customer. However, for the items that do have changes in availability, the information provided to the customer is incorrect, leading to customer dissatisfaction.
Conventional systems for updating the projected shipment date in on-line catalogs center around increased data extraction from the “scheduling application.” For example, the catalog may sample the scheduling application database periodically. To increase performance, the frequency of extracts is increased from say, once a day, to once a shift, or once an hour, etc. Another alternative is to perform an individual extract from the scheduling application database for each given product as it is displayed in the catalog. However, the increased traffic of these alternatives make them undesirable.
Therefore, there is a need for system that updates the anticipated shipment time of products within on-line catalogs only when the shipment time changes. The invention described below provides a method and system that only updates the on-line catalog when the anticipated shipment date changes.